DESCRIPTION

Test::Reporter reports the test results of any given distribution to the CPAN Testers project. Test::Reporter has wide support for various perl5's and platforms.

CPAN Testers no longer receives test reports by email, but reports still resemble an email message. This module has numerous legacy "features" left over from the days of email transport.

Transport mechanism

The choice of transport is set with the transport argument. CPAN Testers should usually install Test::Reporter::Transport::Metabase and use 'Metabase' as the transport. See that module for necessary transport arguments. Advanced testers may wish to test on a machine different from the one used to send reports. Consult the CPAN Testers Wiki for examples using other transport classes.

The legacy email-based transports have been split out into a separate Test::Reporter::Transport::Legacy distribution and methods solely related to email have been deprecated.

ATTRIBUTES

Required attributes

distribution

Gets or sets the name of the distribution you're working on, for example Foo-Bar-0.01. There are no restrictions on what can be put here.

Gets or sets the success or failure of the distributions's 'make test' result. This must be one of:

grade meaning
----- -------
pass all tests passed
fail one or more tests failed
na distribution will not work on this platform
unknown tests did not exist or could not be run

Transport attributes

transport

Gets or sets the transport type. The transport type argument is refers to a 'Test::Reporter::Transport' subclass. The default is 'Null', which uses the Test::Reporter::Transport::Null class and does nothing when send is called.

You can add additional arguments after the transport selection. These will be passed to the constructor of the lower-level transport. See transport_args.

$reporter->transport(
'File', '/tmp'
);

This is not designed to be an extensible platform upon which to build transport plugins. That functionality is planned for the next-generation release of Test::Reporter, which will reside in the CPAN::Testers namespace.

transport_args

Optional. Gets or sets transport arguments that will used in the constructor for the selected transport, as appropriate.

Optional attributes

comments

Gets or sets the comments on the test report. This is most commonly used for distributions that did not pass a 'make test'.

debug

Gets or sets the value that will turn debugging on or off. Debug messages are sent to STDERR. 1 for on, 0 for off. Debugging generates very verbose output and is useful mainly for finding bugs in Test::Reporter itself.

dir

Defaults to the current working directory. This method specifies the directory that write() writes test report files to.

timeout

Gets or sets the timeout value for the submission of test reports. Default is 120 seconds.

via

Gets or sets the value that will be appended to X-Reported-Via, generally this is useful for distributions that use Test::Reporter to report test results. This would be something like "CPANPLUS 0.036".

Deprecated attributes

CPAN Testers no longer uses email for submitting reports. These attributes are deprecated.

address

mail_send_args

mx

METHODS

new

This constructor returns a Test::Reporter object.

perl_version

Returns a hashref containing _archname, _osvers, and _myconfig based upon the perl that you are using. Alternatively, you may supply a different perl (path to the binary) as an argument, in which case the supplied perl will be used as the basis of the above data. Make sure you protect it from the shell in case there are spaces in the path:

$reporter->perl_version(qq{"$^X"});

subject

Returns the subject line of a report, i.e. "PASS Mail-Freshmeat-1.20 Darwin 6.0". 'grade' and 'distribution' must first be specified before calling this method.

report

Returns the actual content of a report, i.e. "This distribution has been tested as part of the cpan-testers...". 'comments' must first be specified before calling this method, if you have comments to make and expect them to be included in the report.

send

Sends the test report to cpan-testers@perl.org via the defined transport mechanism. You must check errstr() on a send() in order to be guaranteed delivery.

edit_comments

Allows one to interactively edit the comments within a text editor. comments() doesn't have to be first specified, but it will work properly if it was. Accepts an optional hash of arguments:

suffix

Optional. Allows one to specify the suffix ("extension") of the temp file used by edit_comments. Defaults to '.txt'.

errstr

Returns an error message describing why something failed. You must check errstr() on a send() in order to be guaranteed delivery.

write and read

These methods are used in situations where you wish to save reports locally rather than transmitting them to CPAN Testers immediately. You use write() on the machine that you are testing from, transfer the written test reports from the testing machine to the sending machine, and use read() on the machine that you actually want to submit the reports from. write() will write a file in an internal format that contains 'From', 'Subject', and the content of the report. The filename will be represented as: grade.distribution.archname.osvers.seconds_since_epoch.pid.rpt. write() uses the value of dir() if it was specified, else the cwd.

Deprecated methods

message_id

CAVEATS

If you experience a long delay sending reports with Test::Reporter, you may be experiencing a wait as Test::Reporter attempts to determine your email address. Always use the from parameter to set your email address explicitly.